Short Review: Shadow Love (2025) 与晋长安
Summary: General Li Shuang ft Song Yi leads the army of Tai Jin. Duan Ao Deng ft Cheng Lei is a prince of the Yao kingdom and lead general. However, an evil ritual causes him to become a blood puppet with immense power that recognizes Li Shuang as his owner and he loses all of his original memory. Li Shuang brings this mysterious man back to her camp, names him Jin An, and he proves himself as they fight off spies and various threats both within and outside the army. However, he recovers his true identity and the two must face off as enemies.
Platform: iQiyi
Episodes: 38
Airing Date: Aug 24, 2025
Warnings – Overall pretty approachable for most audiences. There’s shirtless Cheng Lei for many episodes, that’s the extent of “nudity”.
Final Rating: 5.8/10 – Another Cheng Lei drama, another one with a female general. Sadly, though Cheng Lei and Song Yi do their best with the material given, the plot is a slog. The last 8 episodes were much better than the first 30. This should have been a movie instead.
Li Shuang 黎霜 Song Yi 宋轶
Female general for the Tai Jin kingdom
Jin An 晋安 Cheng Lei 丞磊
Blood puppet for Li Shuang, former Prince of the Yao Kingdom
Su Mu Yang 苏沐扬 Bi Wen Jun 毕雯珺
Crown Prince of the Tai Jin Kingdom
Lu Xin 陆欣 Shi Ce 史策
Friend to Li Shuang, skilled doctor
Plot Overview
Tai Jin female General Li Shuang ft Song Yi is a skilled and competent leader. She is ordered to find the spy within her army within one month. By chance after a bloody battle, she finds a heavily wounded man with no memory. It so happens that this man is originally the Prince of An Nan, Duan Ao Deng ft Cheng Lei, from the Yao Kingdom. A Consort kidnapped his brother, the Emperor, and started an ancient ritual that ultimately turned the Prince into a blood puppet. His injured self happens upon Li Shuang and identifies her as his master who needs her blood to survive.
Li Shuang brings this mysterious man back to her military camp and names him Jin An. Jin An joins Li Shuang in various fights and helps her identify the spy. Using his own intellect, he helps Li Shuang come up with tactics to help the Tai Jin Army, aided by the fantastical powers he gained as the blood puppet.
Overall Thoughts
Cheng Lei’s second drama to air in a month featuring a female general. It’s inevitable that there would be comparisons with this drama vs The Legend of the Female General. Unfortunately, from pure viewership and engagement, Shadow Love falls short compared to the former Cheng Lei drama. It did breach 8500 on iQiYi’s popularity index, and interestingly did better in the last 3rd of the airing period vs the first 2/3 but, it could not compete with the likes of Moonlit Reunion and This Thriving Land. Average episode viewership is also abysmal at just 10mm. On Douban, it received an initial 4.5 rating before climbing to 4.8 during the end of the airing season. I generally agree that this is a worse story overall vs The Legend of the Female General. The last 8 episodes were probably the most interesting and engaging of the entire 38 episode offering.
I think people online had issue with Song Yi’s female general, saying that she doesn’t have the stature or the physique of a female general. She is stick thin and her voice is certainly not deep, but rather high pitched and birdlike, which detracts from what someone would conventionally view as a more masculine role. But, if you look past the physical part of the role, I thought she did a fine job otherwise. Her acting is more mature which fits this more mature role of female general where she actually leads an army. Her enunciation is pretty good and she is able to emote well. The character of Li Shuang is also very badass. From the get go, we see her as the female general and it’s pretty much a “given”. I actually liked that aspect of this story since she didn’t have to hide being a woman. If I were a female actress and given this script, I would prefer this characterization rather than next door’s The Legend of the Female General.
Cheng Lei also showcased increased range in his role here as Jin An. While he was largely brooding and stoic in The Legend of the Female General, Cheng Lei showed a more boyish side to him in this role. I did not easily equate Jin An with Xiao Jue from the two dramas because Cheng Lei was able to act out distinctive traits between the two characters.
However….plot wise it’s a pretty meh drama that could’ve been so much better. Both Song Yi and Cheng Lei did quite a bit of marketing for the show with lots of photoshoots together but it ultimately couldn’t help save the viewership or the interest of this drama. I do laugh that Cheng Lei is shirtless for basically the first 3 episodes and he looks GREAT. So, if anything else, there’s great eye candy from this drama if that’s what you’re looking for.
If You Do Want to Watch...Watch the first few episodes then skip to ep 30
I sooo wanted to like the drama but episodes 10-30 were such a drag. There were a lot of components in the show like a witch doctor, a weird ritual, political scheming and military fighting but it got all jumbled around romance that was also not well done.
Basically, my recommendation is to watch up until we meet the second male lead to understand what the overarching conflict is, and then just skip to episode 30. Episode 30 is around when Jin An recovers his memories as Duan Ao Deng and forgets all of his memories of Li Shuang. That’s where the true intense or interesting components of the show happen and want you to keep “chasing” because you want to see him remember her and his love for her! Otherwise, the plot just putters around with side characters and not the best decisions from Li Shuang.
Overall, this drama was completely wasted potential for 2 actually decent actors with overall decent characters. The plot completely dragged on such that I, along with the rest of anyone who decided to watch this drama, was waiting for Jin An to finally remember his true identity to make the story interesting.
I also actually did have quite a bit of issue with the character of Jin An and the emotional connection he had with Li Shuang. It was stated multiple times that Jin An was “attracted” or wanted to be attached to Li Shuang due to their blood pact and he was very assertive in his attachment towards Li Shuang. Therefore, for the first half of the drama, it was rather difficult for me to understand where the blood pact impact ended and true emotions started. We see more developments later on, but it takes many, many episodes for the true attraction to come through.
